 I have the amazing pleasure, I'm not going to say too much because I understand you're going to be doing the hard work for me, of introing Cheryl, who is a partner at Fish and Strategies and is the co-founder of Jack and Jill Politics, which is one of the top black political blogs. What I can say is that Cheryl is so generous and amazing and wonderful, and I'm so happy she's here to speak with us. She's received all kinds of accolades for sharing the voice of so many underrepresented people. She's here today to do that with us as well. So, Cheryl, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. A few housekeeping things that Becca is far too polite to mention. Please clean up after yourself when you're done. Also, yes, thank you, just to be clear. And then also, please feel free to use the hashtag Berkman if you're tweeting or to use at Berkman Center. And we'll be picking those up because you'd be surprised. There are so many people who wish that they could be here. And they're not as privileged and lucky as you. And your voice can carry far further than you can possibly imagine. So who am I? That's my Twitter handle. Here's a little bit of information about me. I've been very fortunate to receive some awards, including the very first Route 100 list of emerging and established African-American leaders. I've been honored by Fast Company and the Huffington Post, along with the White House, led the first bloggers of color into the White House, which was really exciting during the first administration. And I'm really honored to be an affiliate here at the Berkman Center. I consider that a huge award and an honor to be among so many distinguished people such as yourselves. So in my spare time, I have a couple of jobs. One of them is vision strategy, as Becca mentioned, which provides social technology that creates social change. So we work with the world's leading nonprofits and foundations to help them create communities, both here in the United States and around the world, on all sorts of topics to use technology and to drive messages to policymakers, to corporations that creates positive change. I'm also the co-founder of Attendively. And for those of you who want to learn more about that, I've got lovely color handouts. But Attendively is a next-generation enterprise listening and social marketing automation tool. It's a software product for which we have received, to date, over $500,000 worth of angel investment. And we're actually doing our next round now, which is really exciting. We are one of the rare and the few, and I'll tell you more about that in a second. These are the topics I plan to cover during our time. I'm going to talk for maybe about 20 minutes, and then hopefully we'll have plenty of time for an invigorating discussion among geniuses. So I'm going to cover trends, what's happening out there right now, what's the gap between what's happening and where investment is going, the twin futures that I see emerging. And I'm going to talk briefly about some solutions. So let's jump in, shall we? So hopefully everybody can see this. When I googled nerd in Google, this is what came up. So this is apparently the popular conception and notion of what a nerd looks like. So what does a nerd look like? Just shout it out. What do you think? Glasses, yes. And some of you wear glasses. So what does that say about you? What else? Male. Yeah, male. Yes, anything else? 20s and 30s. Yeah, they're white, Nick. They are white. Yeah, 20s and 30s. But they're white. And as a technologist, sometimes it feels a little bit like this for me. There's one lone black gummy bear amidst many warm and wonderful colleagues. But I'm not alone. There are actually a lot of blurds or black nerds out there like me. And in fact, when this article in Business Insider came out in 2010, it caused a big stir. I know Colin remembers. People were freaked out because that couldn't be possible, because there's one type of nerd. There's one type of person who uses Twitter. But Pew Internet, in particular, an e-marketer, have actually tracked this trend. And it's true that black people tend to use Twitter at twice the rate of whites. Hispanics are not far behind. In fact, today, whites lag behind all other ethnicities in terms of their use of advanced internet, smartphones, and social media. So this chart shows the percentage of different ethnicities who use the YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter at least once weekly. And for those of you who are not sure where white that's the non-ethnics are the white people, as you can see, those are the small pie charts. Small, yes, yes. So there's a lot of data in this, even though these numbers are from 2010, this actually persists today. Whites are certainly falling behind. And what's interesting though, I think, what's exciting is that you've got a group of people among blacks and Hispanics, according to Georgetown University, who are more likely to believe that the internet can be used to further a social issue or a cause, that word of mouth can be really powerful in creating change. That's 58% of blacks who believe that. 51% of Hispanics versus only 34% of whites believe that the internet is actually a tool for creating word of mouth change. And by about a 10 point spread, blacks and Latinos are more likely to see social media as a place where they can get information, as opposed to a much smaller minority of whites. And this is not to this, there are a lot of white people here. This is not to this white people. I'm sure you'll catch up, don't worry. Don't worry. But I think that what I'm here to do is to talk about the trend, right? There's another face, though, that you might not often see when someone talks about who the new nerds are. And that is, if my little clicker works, which it's not, stand by, the technical, always have technical difficulties. What happened? Oh, Rebecca, sorry guys, I'll do a little dance. Well, this is happening. Anyway, while we figure out what's happening with that, what I can tell you is that the next face are women, okay, moms actually are more likely than other groups to use the internet. Something like 89% of moms use the internet at least twice daily. Hold that thought. This seems to have stopped working. What works for you? If you're not doing hard work. Thank you, Ed. So 89% of moms are using the internet at least twice daily. And from studies, we know that that heavy usage means that it's really important. 58% of moms in 2012 said the internet is essential, quote, essential to their lives. Versus 10 years ago, only 17% of moms said that the internet was essential to their lives. And why is that? Why has the internet become so important to moms? Well, a lot of them are trying to keep up with their kids. If you've ever seen a kid with an iPhone, if you're a parent, you better keep up. But also, they tend to be the people doing the shopping in their family. They tend to be the people who are actually managing the finances statistics show. So they're doing shopping, they're doing banking. They're also looking for information. And there's also, I think, an interesting connection with cause marketing. 93% of moms will switch brands if they believe that a product is doing something good for the world. And 60% of them rely on word of mouth to make those decisions. So this is smartphone usage. Moms are more likely, just like African Americans and Hispanics, they are much more likely than the national population to use smartphones. ComScore says that women are now the majority of social media users and spend 30% more time on these sites than men. According to Nielsen, mobile social network usage is 55% female. And what that means is that we're seeing some new products, like Pinterest. How many of you have heard of Pinterest? Probably most of you. Yeah, sophisticated crowd. Pinterest remains 80% female. And it's actually trafficking on a lot of these trends, including mobile, it's a social network, and it's using a lot of photos and images. So that all sounds great. That sounds like a promising future in which really great brands meet the incredible consumers that can empower them. But there's a little bit of a problem. So let's talk about the gap. So this chart shows tech startup founders in California that have received seed or Series A funding. And can you tell me what's wrong with this chart? Is there anything missing? Your category's not there. Yeah, there's a couple of categories that are not there. 82% white, 18% Asian Pacific Islander for Latinos and blacks, it's literally less than 1%. Despite what I just told you in terms of the preponderance of their presence in social networking. Yes, you have a quick question? We're looking at six months. That's just the data that I had available. There's more, believe me. This is not a controversial slide by any means, sadly. This is, it's not better when you look at by gender. When you account for all women in the same period who received Series A or even seed funding, it's a very tiny amount. Again, even though you've got this huge and in fact majority of people who are the users, the Kaufman Foundation says, in fact, that only 4% to 9% of venture capital of any kind has ever gone to female entrepreneurs. And that is in part because of this attitude, right? So this is John Dorr, a very famous venture capitalist. And he stated in front of a whole bunch of other venture capitalists that the way that he structures his investments is to find white male nerds who have dropped out of Harvard and Stanford. And that's how he figured out to invest in Google, which is great. Harvard dropouts have a long history I guess of, but none of you should drop out. Do not leave the Berkman Fellowship Program. However, this type of attitude that's really non-meritocratic, I believe, has had real implications for Silicon Valley's economy. So here in the United States, Silicon Valley, and I think around the world, Silicon Valley is seen as the wave of the future. It's the cradle of innovation, right? It's the way, it's the information technology. But when you look at who's actually succeeding during the recession, it's certainly not blacks who actually lost 20% of their income. It's definitely not Hispanics. According to Catherine Bracey of Code for America and former Berkman team member, women in Silicon Valley make $0.49 for every dollar that men make. That is a steep downward fall, yes, from the $0.77 to a dollar, that's the national average. So what we're seeing is that huge growth of usage, but it's not matching. In fact, there's a retrograde action happening for certain communities in Silicon Valley. Dave McClure, I don't want you to think that I'm bashing white venture capitalists. We've got one here, Nick Grossman, who is amazing. And Dave McClure, who is also a white male venture capitalist, the head of 500 startups, he's a great guy. And he says, look, if a tech startup is not headed by a white male nerd college dropout, it's probably undervalued. It's probably not only a good deal, it's probably the future, right? Because it's going to match more closely to the actual emerging markets that are out there. So let's talk about the futures that are emerging here. So I see two futures, potentially, that are diverging. One, where there's digital equality and opportunity. One that is a mirror, more of a mirror of our society that's bringing diversity of experiences, opinions to the table, creating really exciting new products. And one that just maintains the blind spot that we have now and the illusion that there's a difference between consumers and creators. Or that consumers only come in one flavor in one size and so do creators. I think that really misses out, because when you look at something culturally like Salsa, how many of you know that Salsa is the most popular condiment in America? Yeah. How long has it been the most popular condiment over Ketchup? When did it be Ketchup, you know? 20 years, absolutely. 20 years ago. And that's partly a demographic trend. We have more Latino, but it's also partly a cultural trend. Most people aren't Latino, and yet most people really apparently like Salsa. So something, we're all eating Mexican food here today for lunch. There's been a cultural phenomenon that's been hugely successful. Similarly, when you talk about African-Americans, jazz, hip-hop, fashion, around the world, people actually take their cues from what African-Americans are doing on the street. There's the potential here for these people who are actually very good at expression to help drive worldwide commerce that benefits the United States economy. And I see an opportunity for this wave of expression, hopefully, to turn into a new wave of entrepreneurship that where things get interesting and where we don't think so much about the gender, and there's not this weird blind spot, but in fact that anyone can be seen as a geek. So what are some potential solutions? How are we going to fix that, this? Well, in the past, we've been through this before. The shift from an agrarian economy in the United States to the industrial society wasn't easy, but it was accelerated because corporations looked at education and said these schools, especially high schools, aren't turning out workers who are ready to go to the factory. So you saw business leaders at one time actually lobbying to join local school boards. You don't see that much today, but in the past, that was actually more common because you had people like the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, who saw that these inequities in education were bad for business. They actually needed workers. A word of mouth campaign started in America where people figured out that there were great manufacturing jobs near city centers. And then one of the largest mass migrations in human history started between 1910 and 1970. People like my grandparents started moving from the South towards jobs in the cities. They needed job training. They were coming from the fields to factories. They didn't know anything about making cars. So you had folks like Henry Ford with instilling job training, not just when they started, but throughout as the products that were being manufactured became more and more sophisticated. Finally, affirmative action became prominent in terms of breaking down the last barriers for African-Americans, Latinos, and women to open the doors. Without that, we probably wouldn't have Michelle Obama and Barack Obama today. That affirmative action, even though today, it's extremely controversial. All of those things are things that worked, that actually reinvented the American economy, that actually created, helped to create the middle class that we have now. All of those today are seen as extremely controversial. That's too bad, because we're probably going to miss out. Some of you may have seen this. This is this month's Wired magazine. So this incredibly adorable Mexican little girl, she's 12, her name is Paloma, is on the cover as the next Steve Jobs. And in the article, which I definitely recommend checking out, I cried for like 10 minutes on the DC Metro reading it. But they tell a story of Sugata Mitra, who was a chief scientist at a company in New Delhi training software developers. Right next to this place with the fluent software developers was a slug. And so one day, he's a scientist. He likes to experiment. He placed a computer in a nook on the wall and left it for the local kids who were kind of running around without much guidance, and was just curious what they would do with it. Within a couple of days, they figured out how to use it all on their own without any instruction. So over the years, Mitra's gotten more ambitious. In 2010, he did a groundbreaking study where he loaded a computer with a whole bunch of molecular biology materials. And he just left it out for a bunch of 10 to 14-year-olds and with a small amount of encouragement from a local neighbor, not teaching them anything, just saying, hey, you might want to take a look at what's on there. There's some interesting stuff. Within three months, they taught themselves molecular biology. That's pretty interesting to a lot of people. And that was in a small town, a small rural town in India. He's received a $1 million grant from Ted to continue his work, which is awesome. But he actually ended up inspiring Paloma's teacher, Sergio Juarez Korea, 31, and he teaches next to a dump, a dump that smells, a dump that on a bad day, you can taste it. How poor is the school? Someone actually ripped apart the electrical cord for the projector, the school's projector, to take the tiny amount of copper that was just in that cord. So despite this, or maybe because of it, Sergio started looking around online. He had internet access at home, even though he didn't have it at the school, to see what were some ways in which he could actually change the game for these kids. So what happened was that he used student-led learning with information that he would bring from the internet into the school to let the kids teach themselves, essentially, with some little guidance. He ended up getting not only the best scores for the class overall in Mexico, but Paloma actually got the best grade, period, the highest score in Mexico, all by herself, and is now a national celebrity. So that's pretty exciting, if you ask me. So I see as solutions today, more internet in free public spaces. That doesn't necessarily mean that we're all still going to pay for internet, but just as we have libraries where people can go for free, we need to have places where people can go for free with whatever tool they have, be it mobile or desktop, and actually access the amazing amount body of information that are out there. We need more student-led learning with net-enabled tablets. That works. I mean, you can just leave a kid with it, and they'll teach themselves, apparently. Along those lines, though, you do need a little bit of structure. You need a little bit of encouragement. We need more code and games that teach young and old how to code. There's no job in the future. Whether it's picking up garbage, they use GPS. Whether it's delivering UPS packages, they have to sign on a computerized. There's no job that will not require technology in the future. So we need to make sure that everyone gets something. We can create, for example, online tests that design a pathway for people that tests your aptitude and then structure a self-learning curriculum for them. And then those scores, as someone takes a test, those scores can be lifted up and sent to employers who are looking for workers. I mean, these are actually easy solutions to what seems like a tough problem. More solutions. Eric Rees, another venture capitalist who happens to be a white male. He's amazing. I've met him. For those of you who haven't read Lean Startup, I definitely recommend it. How many of you have read Lean Startup? Yeah, it's amazing. More of you. Gosh, this is a smart room of people. More of you should definitely read Lean Startup. It has certainly influenced the entire culture of Silicon Valley. And it's not a nerd book. It's actually, there's a lot of philosophy in there that I think is interesting, but more about Eric Rees. He is definitely a troublemaker. So he saw the problem of diversity in Silicon Valley and said, what can I do? So he learned about the practice of allowing those who, in orchestras, they had the same problem of mostly white males in orchestras. And people said, well, maybe it's just that men sound better. I mean, literally, that was the argument. That maybe just men are better at instruments. I don't know. So once they actually started putting a screen and having people audition behind a curtain, all of a sudden, the gender composition of orchestras is strange, because as it turns out, women sound just as good as men if you don't know that they're women. Yeah, how about that? So Eric Rees took inspiration from this. And he started blanking out resumes, though the names and the places where people were from. All of a sudden, the people who started coming in for tech pitches for their startups started to change. He wrote about this on his blog. And two things happened. He first got a lot of attention on Twitter, because I just told you that Twitter is dominated by minorities, a lot of really positive applause on Twitter for what he was doing. And then he got a lot of angry, anguished emails from white executives who felt like they'd been accused of something. When he said, look, all I'm trying to do is filter out implicit bias, bias that we don't realize is there so that we can actually rise up talent. So I believe in more hackathons in the hood or bits and bytes in the barrier. We can reinvent the Job Corps, which is a jobs program that trains 16 to 24-year-olds. It's completely industrially. It's essentially shop class, advanced shop class. They should be learning how to code. Those are actually where the jobs are. And I think that we need to glamorize STEM careers. Right now, if you look at bones or CSI, a lot of people want to be forensic scientists. They want to grow up to be, I don't know, morgue doctors, which is pretty macabre. I know, it's so strange. But when you ask kids, they see these shows, and they're really inspired by the science there. We need more actual word of mouth and cultural change that embraces people. Because you know what? We have to reinvent the notion that creating technology successfully is for some and not for all. We have to abandon the notion that just because you live in a garbage dump, that your mind is garbage. Genius is all around us. And an economy that goes from industrial to information and that eliminates extreme poverty in its wake is just within our grasp. Isn't that exciting? Don't you want to be a part of that? But it's not going to happen. We can't do it without each and every person in this room. You are the influencers. Anyone listening to this webcast is someone who can actually help change this story. You have the power to help lead this revolution or to stymie it in its crib. Which future are you going to make? Which future are you going to create? Because make no mistake, we are creating the future today that we're going to live in tomorrow. And it can either look like this. This is me at South by Southwest, hanging out with Mark Zuckerberg at a Facebook party a few years ago. Super fun. And all of those are friends of mine. But the future could continue to look like this. Or it could look like this. Gender balanced, a little more diverse. Or if you don't want to ridge on your forehead, that's fine. I understand. The future can look like this. Or it can look a little more like this. Where we actually are all together. We're all in this together. And there's opportunity for all. So I believe that we're actually in the midst of an intermission. I think these changes are going to happen regardless of whether we work on them or not. I do believe that for America's hegemony, we have to accelerate the change. Or we will be left behind. So what we're in right now may represent actually, even though it seems like we're in a rapid cycle of innovation, it could represent an intermission. And the main attraction is yet to come. I think it's going to look a little like this. This is Web 3.0. How can we trigger the next wave of innovation for her in new hardware and software? We can create a renewed America where we enjoy more prosperity, more freedom, cooler apps for everybody. I want that. We can be more powerful, more respected worldwide, and maintain our leadership as a beacon of hope and opportunity. But first that means creating more opportunity right here. So who is leading? Well, me. Van Jones and I have joined forces to launch a new initiative called Yes We Code. We're convening a whole bunch of leaders together in Silicon Valley. Among those leaders are folks coming from Digital Undivided, Girls Who Geek, Black Girls Code. For those of you who are interested in tracking what Latinos are doing, I definitely recommend the hashtag Latism on Twitter, which stands for Latinos in social media. And if you'd like to meet one of the founders, happy to connect you. She's amazing. And then I'm actually kind of hopeful about Common Core. Common Core is the new curriculum standard that 45 states have now adopted. And it has actually student-led learning as one of its pillars. So I'm hopeful that as that gets rolled out that we can start to see that new innovation. There's a lot more iPads and tablets going into schools. I'm very hopeful about that. So in short, that's me. This is my startup. Any investors feel free to invest later on in the program. But for those of you who are curious about just the software itself, just the technology, it's pretty cutting edge. We're just at Oracle Eloqua Conference, which is a lot of fun. Feel free to grab a flyer or see me after class. So I'll stop talking. And why don't we open it up for questions and discussion? Great presentation. I thought that slide showing that 82% of the firms that got venture capital financing were headed by white males. And one possible interpretation of that is that those guys are spending all of their time coding and hustling to go and get venture capital. Instead of your time on Facebook or watching YouTube videos or some of the other things. Maybe that's not really the popular conception though. And I'm not sure that. I mean, look, when the iPhone was first released, 30% of iPhones in the world within, I guess, two or three years were sold in Silicon Valley. So you've definitely got a very tech-savvy group of people who want to use their smartphones. So that would be a great excuse. But I'm not sure they would cop to that, honestly. It doesn't sound good for them. Yes? Two years ago, I think it was. Now, Joseph Briegel was a fellow here at Berkman. And he did a lot of work looking at the experiences of women when they were in the tech field. A lot of looking at what happens to women when they move into the field, which, yes, they're graduating with more women in computer sciences and the rest now. Actually, we're graduating less. Less now than you are. Less now. There are actually fewer women entering computer science, which is a troubling trend, again, that we should be really looking hard at. But even the ones who do, in what his research points to, and he's done a lot of writing and reports on this as he's moved over to teach at Northeastern, is that when they get into the environment, they find incredible discrimination and gender issues that exist within their workplace that they're constantly battling against. And then the products, the commercial products of a lot of the IT world and the video games and the rest are very much geared toward violence against women, demeaning of women, et cetera. So it seems there's a much broader sort of cultural plane that this sits on for women. I'm not as well-versed in the minority issues, but maybe you could speak to this. I mean, I think that I live in the Bay Area. So I can speak to that. I mean, I think the Bay Area and technologists in general tend to have either a liberal or a libertarian bent. I think that there is a lot of well-meaning spirit. But yeah, they're still biased. They're still biased. They're still blocks, sometimes unintention. I mean, look at Marissa Meyer. There you have a tech CEO who, even though she built a nursery for herself next to her office, then said, well, we're going to end flex workplace or working from home for women who weren't as fortunate as her. She has since had to backtrack from that. And the policy is now different. There were a number of problems with the way that that was handled. But yeah, I mean, even part of the thought was, well, if you have more female CEOs, will that help? It is helping or female board members. But yeah, there is a cultural, which is why I advocated more TV shows, more ways to glamorize, more consciousness of this issue so that we reinvent what we think of as nerd. Yes? Comment on a question. I agree with everything that's been said in the room. I think it'll take a generation to change on the women's issue because I'm part of an angel investment group now. I'm the only female in there. But I think it's because everyone kind of made their money through the technology field and through being entrepreneurs and so forth. And they were all white males. So now they're all white male investors. And we'll see more Marissa Meyers. We'll see more of you people. Yeah, I'm not an athlete, trust me. But I think they'll graduate. And we're beginning to see a lot of investment groups that are specifically focused on investing in women's startups like Springboard. Yeah, there are definitely serious change, Jolly Adventures, K-Pore Capital, New Media Ventures. There's a lot more energy. There is consciousness being raised of the stark problems right now in Silicon Valley. And that is leading. But not everyone has changed. And it's still, I think, a nascent movement. And there's still Google, the St. Jose Mercury News every year asks many of the big companies like HP and Google and Apple and Facebook to share their stats on how many minorities work there. And every year they refuse. Because the numbers are so low. So there's Palo Alto. And then there's East Palo Alto. And it's not like you would think that East Palo Alto would provide a fertile ground of people who need jobs, who are mostly Latino to a certain extent, African-American, who are underemployed or unemployed. In some cases, you would think that there would be a lot of hackathons in the hood over there or efforts. And there's less of that than you might imagine. And that's what needs to change. Yes, Nick? Two questions that are sort of related. This morning I was talking to my wife about the Sheryl Sandberg book, the whole idea of lean-in and the dialogue that's happening in the sort of traditional feminist community that takes issue with the idea that you should lean in and sort of do things, perform more like a man in the man's world rather than rearchitect the world in a more fair and just way and that debate. And then a lot of what you're talking about about the demographics of the internet and technology sound a lot like Clay Christensen disruptive innovation where the establishment keeps investing in something that is no longer relevant. And then a new market emerges that was not previously served and was typically at the bottom end market. And that these guys are just going to ignore that until it's too late. And then this will be bigger and will win. So both of those are sort of like, maybe it's, does that provide an opportunity to capitalize on the blind spots of the establishment industry and create a bigger win for folks who get this that shift? Right, the people who get this are going to make a lot of money for sure. Because I mean, you saw what I put out for the trend. But that said, I think that there's a huge miss opportunity in terms of the geniuses that are all out there where we could be funding those startups that actually meet this need that won't get funded, that that great idea is going to die or drift apart. Some of you probably know the story from PDF about Elijah McCoy. Elijah McCoy, during the industrial age, happened to be a former slave. He also invented this special type of gear. I don't know how trains work, but a special type of technology for trains that made them run faster and made them need less maintenance. But because he was black, it took him a really long time to get investment for his idea, even though trains still use the real McCoy. That's what it was called. They still use it today. So we could end up like that, where something that was so critical to American infrastructure trains, actually progress is delayed. Sure, we still built them. Eventually people figured out that the real McCoy was a great thing and that we needed it and otherwise. But literally it took him at least 20 years to get people. We were 20 years behind where we would have been if he'd gotten. And my concern is that we could end up that way or that at least corporations eventually stepped in and demanded that high schools and elementary schools be redesigned. What if corporations don't? How long will it take for them to demand that schools just be completely reinvented so that we're turning out people not prepared for the industrial age but for the information age? You are so talking my language. Good girl. You know, the kids who live next to the dumps, their brains are not dumps. And I was the mom in the classroom who 35 years ago was actually teaching kids to code. Of course, they were all boys. But I was the mom and they were the boys. But your concept of getting in at the beginning and getting into education and really changing the way people think about who this generation actually are and what they can do and what they need, that is just so on track with what we all need to be doing. I mean, you're absolutely right. Everybody, but everybody needs to recognize that out there there are the kids from Mongolia who's at MIT now because of MOOCs. Or all of the people in jail who are about to be re-released. Do we release them with no skills? Or do we get them coding now so that they can actually be useful to society? And maybe a whole bunch of them will be less interested in crime. We're making the decisions now about what type of society we're going to live in. And for me, don't even do it for the kids. Like, if you don't want to do it for Paloma, that's fine. Do it because you want to maintain the American standard of life, right? I mean, that's what's really threatened here in part, right? The future of our actual economy. Yes? Bringing up the social schools and corporate involvement in redesigning schools, do you think the charter schools are getting this right more than the public schools are? No. No, I don't. I mean, I think that it's better. But you've still got the same. Basically, you've got teachers who were frustrated with either the union system or just the standardized testing system and wanted to teach in a new way. But I mean, you have teachers of one generation who are non-digital natives who have, in most cases, received very little retraining on technology who are then teaching digital natives, right? Who actually would do just fine with a computer that had all the curriculum that they needed, right? With a little, I mean, we are so far away from where we need to be. The charter school experiments aren't working, huh? Not really, no. I mean, no. It's slightly better education, but slightly better is really just not good enough. And why isn't it better? Because it's slightly, right, and why can't it be better? There's no reason. Yeah, why? Somebody just mentioned these MOOCs, the free online courses. And there's certainly people who've started those and put out a lot of hype about how this can really serve under-served communities. But their numbers don't bear that out. As far as the people taking them, it seems to be like 70% are people who've already gone to college degree for most of the people, providers of these free courses. I guess I'm curious why isn't when those free content is out there. Is that basically that kind of social gap mentioned of perception of this? Why aren't more people, why isn't that sort of doing this kind of having people find it on their own so to speak since it's out there? Right, it's out there. But unless people realize that it's out there, there's no commercials for that, right? There's no, there's commercials right now. You can go to school to learn car maintenance, right? We've all seen those commercials, right? How many commercials have you seen for? Here's the place where you can actually go learn and have a great career in technology for free. And here's someone who looks like you who's actually doing that, right? Like I think it's partly a social confidence. You've got people who actually don't realize that being really good at Facebook is something that someone would hire you to do, right? That it's great that you're good at talking to your little friends, but if you actually take that skill and apply it to other people, that's called a community manager. I think there's just a complete lack of awareness of what those jobs are. I mean, even look, I did a talk at City College of San Francisco, right? A lot of minority kids who are really struggling, right? Like this is the best college that they can afford. And they called me in and it is if Apple and Google and Yahoo was on another planet for them, even though they're in the same city, they're, you know, it's around them all the time. I mean, I think there's just literally this complete chasm between the idea of who are consumers and who can be creators. And that we have to change. Yes. I'm a pessimist, so I assume the answer to this is no, but I feel like I should be asked it for completeness. Sure. Is there any reason to believe that the venture capital community in Kendall Square behaves any differently than the one in Silicon Valley? I think it is similar issues. Oh, you can hear. I can hear. So the question was, is there any reason to believe, is Kendall Square here in Boston? Yeah. So is there any reason to believe that people the venture capitalists in Kendall Square are doing a better job at this than Silicon Valley? No. I mean, they're probably doing a worse job actually, sadly. I mean, Boston is well known as, you know, kind of a conservative town, frankly. But I do think that, you know, this is a topic that, you know, is starting to bubble up and come to a head in places like Kendall Square and Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley. There is a dawning awareness. It's still kind of seen as this like nice thing or kind of impact investing as opposed to sort of, this is what will save the American middle class, right? Like if you put it in those terms of like, here's how we retain our economic and military hegemony. I mean, you need, you know, they fly the drones using computer games, right? I mean, essentially, right? Like you need people who are actually trained and primed and ready for that type of military activity. We just don't have, you know, the kids who are on the Jersey Shore, right? I mean, those kids are not trained to do anything, right? And that's what kids see onto you. And I'm not saying that the Jersey Shore isn't incredibly entertaining, right? But, you know, when you hear what those kids were, the track that they were on before the Jersey Shore, in terms of being, you know, hairdressers. And I mean, none of them had technology as a thing that they ever inspired to, even though they now use it to maintain their, right? Their social, you know, profile and entertainment. Just wondering, I mean, do you have to be part of a class to actually vote for it or to provide a product for it? Because Jonathan Ives was an Englishman working in Silicon Valley producing products that Apple makes for the entire world. So certain things are just universal. And while I don't deny that people should be included in the workplace should be more diverse, I just wonder about the kind of organization where you assume that women can code better for women and men can make better. I mean, we have a code designed by gay men. Absolutely, I certainly do. I'm just curious about whether there's any research about the correlation between producing for a community and being part of that community, whether something's transcendent. That is a great question. So for those of you who didn't hear, the question is Jonathan Ivy does create products. He's a British guy for Apple and everybody likes those. Everybody likes iPads and iPhones. Does it matter what class of person you're from? And that's in a way, that's actually exactly the point. It shouldn't matter. Great ideas and genius can come from anywhere. And so we're probably missing out on really good ideas because they don't come in a package that people respond to. But studies have shown here at the Harvard Business Review, study after study shows that a diversity of ideas and experiences in the workplace tends to lead to more productivity, tends to lead to higher profits, particularly if you have women, every women led board or board that has women on tends to be more profitable. I mean, there are statistics that actually bear this out. So you've got then again, kind of a gap between what we know to be true scientifically in terms of diversity and what actually is happening on the ground. And coding was invented by a woman. Coding was invented by a woman, that is true. Other questions? Yes, Hassek? Cheryl, where can the tech industry succeed where other industries have failed? I'm thinking of say sports or even media where, say sports where you look at professional basketball most of the players from ethnic minorities, very few of the coaches and probably, I don't know how many of you and there's possibly even none. So what does the tech industry have where others have not succeeded and have been talking about this and trying for a long time? Yeah, that's a great question. For those of you who might not have heard, the question is how can the tech succeed where so many others have failed? If you look at something like basketball, you've got a high minority percentage of players, but very few coaches and owners. What I would say to that is, A, baseball used to be all white. I don't know if any of you saw 42, right, baseball used to be all white and now it's pretty heavily Latino and black. It's starting, you're starting to see some pressure, kind of similar pressure in terms of, why is it that we don't have as many coaches when you've got former players, right, that you would think would probably make great coaches. And the ownership, that's a whole other question in terms of, who owns, who has wealth and who doesn't. That said, when you look at professions like law or medicine that used to be all male, very much white, now you actually have more women graduating from law school and medical school. So it is possible for the tech industry to succeed in much the same ways that those have succeeded, I think. Yes. I have a question referencing what you said earlier about the sort of imperfect relationship today between the lack of digital natives as teachers and the digital natives as students and the example you had of give them a computer and they will learn the world. I'm wondering what the research that you've found or what your own instincts tell you that when we do get to a point potentially or if we're at a point where the actual person who could be the teacher is in fact as digitally aware as the people they're teaching, is it ideally better to have a human being in the interaction or are you saying that it's better to have the kids just simply be taught by interfacing with the machine? Well, I think that we need, people need people. There's no substitute, right? I think what Sugata Mitra is experimenting with, his new venture, this is the guy who left the computer out for kids in the slum, what he's got is the kids in a classroom with computers that have, it's not, you just throw them at the internet. I mean, there is a little bit of structure, right? There's some topics for them to learn and some things, but this is in rural India, then you have what he calls the granny cloud and it's retired British teachers who Skype in and the kids can talk to them and get some encouragement or ask questions, just to have some feedback, just to have some adult coaching, but then they can also turn off the teachers if they want. They can just call them and say, hey, they've got a friendly voice. I mean, I do think when you look at Mitra's method, having that encouraging adult, of course, we were all kids once, we remember how much having a teacher encouraged us meant for furthering our learning, so I don't think you can do it completely without people, without humans and that elder student relationship is critical, but I do think that having something where you let the kids kind of have at it when they are clearly so good at it and we're holding them back, they actually can teach each other to a certain extent with some guidance, with a little structure, there's a great TED Talk on why schools kill creativity. It's apparently one of the most popular TED Talks ever, but right now, you didn't need creativity to work on an assembly line, right? These schools are engineered to turn out the perfect soldier or the perfect assembly line worker, period, and that's all over the world. That's not just here, that's in China, that's in India, no matter where you go and that's just not what's needed. Those aren't the skills that are needed for the new economy that we're creating, yeah. All right, you talked about rebuilding the middle class and all of this, I mean the thing that's most exciting about technology in there for me is the fact that it pushes power out all the way to the edges to directly the people let them do things on their own that's never possible for and that's incredibly empowering on a huge, massive scale. One of the challenges with that though is it often cuts out the bureaucratic middle layer that was providing services before, whether that's teachers union, record labels, you pick your sort of institutional middle layer and that's the thing that accounts for most middle class wealth in our whole country and so you've got this period where there's opportunity wealth being distributed out at a rapid pace which is incredibly awesome but there's also this phenomenon where that cuts the legs off of established industry and which is a sort of political problem and economic problem that's not necessarily short term and that also often times stands in the way of making, the reason we don't have books, every book ever published on an Android device for free in the hands of every six year old in the entire world is because of copyright holders holding up and book publishers sort of blocking that kind of stuff and so that's the old economy fighting the new economy. How do you see the new middle class emerging when it's sort of in some ways in conflict with the existing middle class? It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. I mean look, like things are things, we are living through one of the most rapid and probably one of the most not violent in terms of actual hopefully it won't come to that but things are changing very quickly and we are a part of that change and we're living through that change. When you look at something like the app, the app clouds that have emerged, those are new marketplaces that didn't exist 10 years ago. So new structures will emerge, we're going to create those new structures and older structures are gonna die and that's part of the challenge here. The stats that I show you show that we don't have enough people trained to build those apps for the Android cloud, the Eloqua app cloud, the iPad apps. We could actually churn out a lot more if we had more workers and thus build more wealth. Institutions as we know it are going to rise and fall over this stuff. We've all seen in this generation a great disruption in terms of how people shop, how people buy houses, how people get jobs, how people take tests to go to school. I mean, it doesn't mean that people don't still take tests to go to school but they do take them in a different way and different skills are needed to then engineer that. So what I would say is that, yeah, there's a potential for a lot of people to get hurt and for civilization, for some people to get left behind and that's something that I'd like to see prevented. I would like to see the opportunity for this new middle class to create its own wealth, to create new marketplaces. But right now, there's a whole group of people who are blocked from that. Yes? Have you done any research on whether there's the same disparity between women and men and all the other sectors in starting up non-profits organizations? That is a good question. So the question is, you know, is there the same disparity in non-profit startups? I'd have to look that up. I mean, I work with a lot of, you know, the world's leading non-profits and foundations. You know, I would say that it has changed over time. There's definitely a lot of women involved. Just as if you look at marketing, you know, there's a difference between mad men, the TV show, and that world, right? Which, you know, for some of us, it was our grandparents or parents who lived through versus what you see in marketing now, right? The marketing world is filled with women. There's a lot of female executives or, you know, workers at every level. So, you know, I think that it's somewhat more balanced than the other, at least on the female side, if not the race side. But there's definitely not nearly as skewed as the tech sector, not at all, at least from my experience. How are we doing? Should we, one more question? Yeah. Yes, sorry. I have a piggyback question on that. From your experience to you, have you noticed any difference in the composition of teams or are any more less collaborative? So the question is... Like a lone founder or an all-male founding group or more collaborative, like, distributed credit configuration? Yeah. So the question is, you know, have I found that there's a difference between, you know, different gender-based teams in terms of collaboration, the ideas? I mean, the studies show... I mean, there's actually been... There's actually quite a lot of data on this. The studies show time and time again that that is something that... Particularly if you structure the team a certain way. If it's clear that you need, for example, each member of the team to contribute in order to get to the result, that really drives the best possible result, at least from the studies that I've shown. But yes, I mean, every time they do a study, it's pretty obvious that diversity of any kind, even if you've got, you know, white men who are of different, you know, from different cities, you've got all white men who are from different class structures, like that, you know, diversity always gets a better result because you just get a richness of ideas. Life is boring if it's all, you know, one thing, same, same all the time, right? We need each other for spice. What I mean is the funding relationship between us. You see that, for example, it's easier to fund certain types of companies because they have a clearer story of the founding members rather than, say, a more complex, collaborative configuration that maybe doesn't get funded as often. In terms of... Well, the question for those of you in the back is she was actually talking more about who gets funded and whether it's a funding configuration that matters, that's simple versus a funding collaboration that's more complex. Look, I mean, there's clearly implicit or explicit bigotry happening in Silicon Valley. I mean, the numbers just clearly starkly show that certain people have a harder time getting funding. I mean, had I known those numbers before I started looking for seed capital for a tentatively, I would have been incredibly discouraged. I probably wouldn't have done it, right? I just didn't, I'm just too, you know, like, bullheaded to know. So I just started asking people, you know, to fund a tentatively because I thought it was a good idea. I did find it very difficult in the first round. It was really difficult to get phone calls. I had someone say to my face, you know, I don't think that, you know, this is a really great idea, but I don't know if you two, speaking of me and my co-founder, I don't know if you two are the ones who are going to do it. I mean, that's the kind of thing that you face right now rather than just looking at an idea and people who have a track record of success or even if they don't, just looking at their background and saying, because it's all about background in Silicon Valley, at least. I don't know about in Kendall Square. It's all about the founder's background and who are you, you know, what are you made of? You know, if you're already filtering out in terms of, well, if you're not a white male college dropout from Harvard or Stanford, I mean, that's going to eliminate a whole lot of potential smart entrepreneurs, right? Yeah, I would say so. So I think that that is a really pervasive problem. I think it's something that hopefully, you know, we can find ways to filter out that kind of, you know, non-intentional, I think in many cases, bias, you know, just that we filter it out so that we can let the great ideas actually bubble up. How are we doing on time? I think we should close.